Theatre: my best nights Paul Bailey

MY PIN-UP PERFORMERS

If – and it’s the biggest ‘if’ in the world right now – coronavirus is ever contained, and life is allowed to return to what we shall have to call the ‘old normal’, perhaps the ancient art of the theatre will thrive again.

Actors, musicians, designers, stagehands and all those who contribute to putting on a show, of whatever quality, will be employed once more. I hope to be around when that happy day arrives.

So I’m obeying the rules, when they’re comprehensible, and wearing colourful masks, just like the actors who graced the first performances of plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. I’ve been to the sites of Greek and Roman theatres in Turkey and stood in amazement at the size and scale of them. It wasn’t difficult to imagine them occupied by hundreds of excited spectators.

That feeling of excitement before and during a play, a ballet, an opera, a concert and, especially, a solo performance is one that has never left me after six and a bit decades of theatre-going.

I first felt it when I was still in short trousers, as I sat bewildered in the gallery of the Grand at Clapham Junction, one of the few surviving music halls, as one very old artiste followed another onto the stage in a show entitled, appropriately, The Good Old Days. A woman dressed as a sailor was there, smoking a pipe; and a man with a face painted black with large, white lips, recalling how he used to sigh for the silvery moon.

Years later, at the beautiful Metropolitan in Edgware Road, long since gone – despite the efforts of John Betjeman, among others, to save it from developers – I saw Max Miller, the Cheeky Chappie, captivate and startle audiences with his innuendo-ridden jokes. ‘It’s not me, lady, it’s your mind,’ he would say to a woman in the stalls, already laughing uncontrollably before he had even reached the punchline.

Max was banned from the BBC Light Programme, as was Rex Jameson, who always appeared in drag as Mrs Shufflewick, an elderly lady with a red conk, nursing a Guinness in the saloon bar of the Cock and Comfort. I caught his incomparable act at the Greenwich Theatre, an oddly respectable venue for a comic whose gags were concerned with lost knickers and feet trapped in John West salmon tins after an unbridled outburst of passion in a dark alleyway with a needy young man in bell-bottoms.

The Cheeky Chappie: Max Miller (1894-1963)

I remember John Gielgud’s Benedick and Leontes from my schooldays; and Edith Evans in a long-forgotten play, Daphne Laureola, with the then unknown Peter Finch – she gave the most convincing drunken acting I’ve ever witnessed. She was notably abstemious in real life.

Wilfrid Lawson – Doolittle in the film of Pygmalion – was, by contrast, seldom sober. When he was, he scaled heights most actors could never aspire to – I think of him as the father in Strindberg’s masterpiece The Father, weeping in the arms of his nurse, played by Beatrix Lehmann, in the closing scene.

In my last year at the Central School, where I trained for my short-lived career on stage and screen, Beatrix, always accompanied by her golden retriever, taught us. I asked her once what it had been like to act with Wilfrid Lawson. She said she loved him. He would come every night to her dressing room before the curtain rose with an assortment of coloured pencils in his hand. He would identify the colour of each one, proving he hadn’t touched a drop. She found that very touching.

Let me single out a few of my most wonderful nights at the theatre: Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble in Mother Courage in the 1950s, when anything German was still unpopular, and the Moscow Art Theatre in that same decade, performing Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and Three Sisters. The sets were cumbersome and tired-looking, but the acting was a revelation.

I was already accustomed to English productions of Chekhov that smothered those glorious human comedies under a blanket of sentimental nostalgia, but these Russian actors knew different. They laughed, sobbed, talked over one another’s sentences and achieved pathos by not signalling it.

Then there was Peggy Ashcroft as Hedda Gabler, and – more recently – Laurie Metcalf as Mary in O’neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, and brilliant new plays by the likes of Lucy Kirkwood and Annie Baker, and Imelda Staunton in everything, and…